Maya exhibit featuring 300 artifacts opens at Milwaukee Public Museum

"Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed," the traveling exhibit running through May 28 at the Milwaukee Public Museum is the largest display ever shown in the United States of the ancient Mayan civilization that once dominated Central America.
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Exhibit curator Carter Lupton points out lettering on a statue of 13 Kings. The Milwaukee Public Museum has a new exhibit about the Mayan civilization called "Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed."(Photo: Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)Buy Photo

The Mayan civilization built huge pyramids, temples and giant stone monuments adorned with ornate carvings while ruling a wide swath of Central America.

They kept detailed calendars, were adept at agriculture and astronomy, communicated through a sophisticated written language and developed city-states connected by a complex trade network in what is now southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.

And then they vanished.

That's what many scientists believed after the ruins of Mayan cities were discovered decades ago, camouflaged by rain forests. But visitors to a newly opened exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, "Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed," will learn Maya actually didn't go anywhere.

While the monuments built by rulers between 250 and 900 A.D. during what's known as the Classic Period were abandoned by the time the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the 1500s, the Maya people were farming and living peacefully. They didn't have the riches of the Aztecs and the Incas, and the Spanish didn't mention the Maya in their written accounts.

At left is the statue of U'baah K'awill transforming himself from the king of Copan into its patron god. At right, the stone statue of Mayan King K'ak' Tiliw Chan Yo'at, which means "Fire-burning Celestial Lightning God." This God aligns himself with the creative powers of the Maize God. Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Exhibit curator Carter Lupton points out lettering on a statue of 13 Kings. The Milwaukee Public Museum has a new exhibit about the Mayan civilization named "Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed." It is the largest exhibition about the ancient Mayans ever to be displayed in the United States. Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

This special exhibit uses authentic artifacts, immersive environments and hands-on activities to explore the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization. The exhibit was created by the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the Museum of Science, Boston. Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The tomb of a king shows several artifacts, such as a decorated serving dish with the remains of a bird on the dish. Although mourners expected Great Scrolled Skull to be reborn as a god, they left food in his tomb to feed him on his journey through the underworld. Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A mosiac mask made from Jadeite, shell and pyrite wasn't made to be worn. Inside the tomb of Great Scrolled Skull, it probably depicted an ancestor. Mourners placed it atop a stone bowl and eventually it fell apart. Archaeologists reassembled it. Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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Among the 300 artifacts on display in the exhibit are items not usually seen in the United States, including replicas of large stone columns filled with carvings, replicas of the Madrid and Dresden codices of Maya books on parchment and a re-creation of a tomb of a Maya ruler who died 1,500 years ago in northern Belize.

Lupton noted that it was only within the last few decades that scholars finally translated and fully understood the ancient Mayan language.

Standing before a replica of Altar Q, a large table-like stone with carvings of men on all four sides found at the archaeological site Copan in Honduras, Lupton said, "Before they could read glyphs, they would say this is probably a group of Maya lords meeting to discuss astronomy or the calendar.

"But now we can read glyphs and this is actually all of the lords of one city — 16 kings in succession at one site. That's the kind of information that's changed now that we can read glyphs," said Lupton, who has traveled extensively in Central America but has not performed field work there as an archaeologist.

The replicas of the Madrid and Dresden codices are poignant — there are only four known Mayan hieroglyph books that survived the Spanish, who ordered the burning of all of the Mayan books in the 1500s. The Dresden codex is the oldest surviving book of the Americas.

Two large replica stone stelae placed side by side — the actual columns are in Honduras and Guatemala — are connected historically. The ruler who ordered the creation of one of the monuments conquered and beheaded the ruler, known as 18 Rabbit, who created the other. Eighteen Rabbit had been one of the most powerful rulers in Copan but experienced a startling reversal of fortune in 738 when the neighboring kingdom rose up.

Artifacts include small items like turquoise and gold earrings and a golden monkey pendant found in tombs, pottery and funerary urns, a rock crystal knife and flints in the shape of scorpions. There are also larger items, including re-creations of a portion of the famous frieze from the El Castillo pyramid in Xunantunich and the elaborate royal tomb of the Great Scrolled Skull from a site in Belize.

If you go

"Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed" is on display through May 28 at the Milwaukee Public Museum, 800 W. Wells St. Exhibit admission, by timed ticket and including admission to the museum, is $25 for adults, $18 seniors, $16 youths ages 5 to 12. For more information visit mpm.edu.